Emergentism as a Religion of Complexity

* Book: Emergentism: A Religion of Complexity for the Metamodern World. By Adyahanzi, Brendan Graham Dempsey. Metamodern Spirituality Series, Vol. VI.

URL = https://www.brendangrahamdempsey.com/metamodern-spirituality-series

Contextual Quote

"Emergentism is a novel spiritual framework informed by the revelations of complexity science, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, consciousness studies, developmental psychology, and other cutting-edge disciplines."

- Brendan Graham Dempsey [1]

Description

"The new sciences of complexity have completely revolutionized our understanding of the universe as well as our place in it. At a time when nihilism and meaninglessness are affecting more people than ever, the new cosmic story of complexification comes as a genuine revelation. Evolution, we now know, is not some senseless meandering, but part of an ever-deepening learning process by which the universe is waking up to itself. And, as highly complex, conscious beings, we have a unique role to play in this cosmic drama.

Addressing the meaning crisis head-on, this book synthesizes such insights and explains their profound implications for spirituality and human purpose. Applying a ‘civilizational design’ lens to this endeavor, it boldly presents these ideas in terms of a new religion for our time. Emergentism is the complexity-informed, sincerely ironic, co-created religion for a metamodern moment poised between breakdown and breakthrough. In a time between worlds, at the edge of chaos, the conditions are ripe for a new God to emerge."

History

On Substack, the author goes into the details of the sources of the Emergentist approach:

BRENDAN GRAHAM DEMPSEY:

• Lineage: 1. Eastern and Western Mysticism [2]

"Emergentism is a novel spiritual framework informed by the revelations of complexity science, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, consciousness studies, developmental psychology, and other cutting-edge disciplines. At the same time, the ideas that it speaks to are actually surprisingly ancient.

• Lineage: 2. German Idealism [3]

With the advent of modernity, the religious worldview’s belief in an immaterial, eternal supernatural realm became no longer tenable. Reality had proven itself to be inescapably naturalistic and subject to change over time. Whatever “God” might be, it was clear that he could no longer be cognized in such mythic metaphysical terms, but needed to be understood in light of time and flux like everything else.

• Lineage: 3. Analytical Psychology [4]

Another paradigm with remarkable overlap with Emergentism, despite coming from a very different starting place, is the analytical psychology pioneered by Carl Jung in the early to mid-20th century.

• Emergentism | Lineage: 4. Process Theology [5]

Another intellectual lineage rich in Emergentist insight is so-called “process theology,” a theological paradigm that parts with traditional notions of God as “eternal” and “unchanging” and instead stresses the ways in which God might be conceived as affected by temporal processes and subject to transformation. According to the process theologian John Cobb, “process theology may refer to all forms of theology that emphasize event, occurrence, or becoming over substance.”

• Lineage: 5. Integral Theory [6]

The last conceptual paradigm that we will consider here as a meaningful theological lineage of Emergentism is integral theory. Without doubt, the person most responsible for the current state of this school of thought is American philosopher and writer Ken Wilber—though Wilber is himself a synthesizer of various traditions and disciplines."

Discussion

Drawing connections with spiritual and philosophical traditions of the past

Brendan Graham Dempsey:

"With the maturation of the sciences out of reductionism and into the neo-holistic perspective we have been considering, the split between reason and religion is disappearing. Science has not proved nor disproved religion; nor has religion triumphed over science. Rather, both have been transformed by the other, with religion learning to adopt the methods of empiricism and critical scrutiny and science learning to speak in the language of meaning and purpose. The result is not some strange truce between traditional religion and modern science, then, but more like the formation of a new category altogether, a “religion that is not a religion,” in which a Universe of meaning and sublime significance is simply, well, the best explanatory theory.

In drawing connections with spiritual and philosophical traditions of the past, we are not simply suggesting that the ancients possessed the pure and eternal truth that science is now corroborating. Such a claim flies in the face of the very essence of Emergentism — namely, that knowledge grows, truth evolves, and information increases from past to future. Rather, we are invited to consider the continuity of wisdom’s development, to see the present truth prefigured in the past, to find our story told by the ancestors in their own way. In doing so, our timely truth not only gains a sense of heritage, antiquity, and depth, but we also come to new insights about it when placed in the context of a deeper intellectual tradition."

(https://brendangrahamdempsey.substack.com/p/emergentism-lineage-1-eastern-and?)